Monday, November 25, 2013

Baroness Warsi to give Benedict XVI Lecture

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the Government’s minister for faith and
communities, will give the second Benedict XVI Lecture in London on
December 2.

Lady, who met with Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the president of the
Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, when he
visited the UK in June 2013, will speak on the topic of ‘Freedom of
Religion in the Public and Private Sphere’.

The lecture, that will be held at the University of Notre Dame, is to
be chaired by Archbishop Vincent Nichols and will be followed by a
question and answer session.

Last week Lady Warsi said in a speech at Georgetown University in
Washington DC that she fears Christians face becoming “extinct” in large
parts of the world and called for a “cross-faith, cross-continent”
response to the problem of persecution.

Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, she said: “There are
huge advantages to having pluralistic societies – everything from the
economy to the way people develop educationally, and therefore we all
have an interest in making sure that Christian communities do continue
to feel that they belong and are not persecuted in the places where this
religion was born.”

Earlier this month Lady Warsi, a former chairman of the Conservative
party, claimed that the Coalition Government was one of the “most
pro-faith governments in the West.”

She told an audience at the
Churchill Archives at the University of Cambridge that public policy had
been “secularised” under New Labour and that Sir Winston Churchill and
Baroness Thatcher would have been in agreement with the Coalition’s
pledge to protect the right of town halls to hold prayer meetings.

In February 2012 Lady Warsi led a delegation of six UK ministers on a
visit to the Vatican, where she gave a speech in which she criticised
“intolerant secularism” and met with former pope, Benedict XVI.

She
previously met the Pope Emeritus at St Mary’s University College in
Twickenham during his historic state visit to the UK.